Track Micro Conversions for your Ecommerce Success

When it comes to conversions, much of the emphasis is placed on tangible sales. It’s not surprising given most of your marketing efforts are geared towards that very result. But these macro conversions aren’t the only aspect to consider in order to improve your overall ecommerce success.

If macro conversions are sales, micro conversions are those actions carried out by the user before hitting that all important ‘pay now’. That includes the full process from reading blog posts before accessing a product on your site to navigating the checkout and even sharing posts on social media.

Tracking micro conversions from email

There are tons of micro conversions to consider, so why not start with your email newsletter? A simple analysis can provide insightful results without the need to dig too deep.

The purpose of most marketing emails is to sell a product, encouraging the user to click through and hit ‘buy now’ or carry through with the call-to-action. Although that end result is considered a macro conversion, the opens and clicks from the email are the micro conversion. Studying these could help you improve the effectiveness of the email to ultimately increase sales.

In order to do this, all links within the email must be trackable. This gives priceless information as to how many users are clicking through from the email. And if they carry through with this first action, how long they stay on your site before exiting. Alarming bounce rates may suggest a problem with the website while few clicks from the email would require a fresh approach with your newsletter marketing.

By splitting your users into three or more groups and sending several different emails, you can analyse which of those gave the best results. Thus, providing the most optimum email layout and content for future campaigns.

Tracking micro conversions on site

Tracking micro conversions for email provides great results, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. As mentioned, there are plenty of these same metrics ready to provide insights for pages across your site.

Using Goals in Google Analytics is a great first step to understanding what exactly your micro conversions are. This can change depending on what you’re selling; maybe a clothes retailer would analyse the Pinterest ‘pin’ of a product while a specialist car parts site would place more emphasis on referrals from social media.

To get started tracking any aspect that may seem important, simply click ‘Goals’ in the Admin tab and start configuring to your individual needs. Always keep it simple as you don’t want overly complex data that is time consuming to analyse. Data should be clear and concise, easily condensed into a readable format that allows you to strategise and build upon the results.

If you’re new to this form of analysis, it’s especially important to only track basic micro conversions and avoid the temptation to track as much as possible. By narrowing down the most important micro conversions, you’ll be able to fully analyse each one effectively. Give it a try and you’ll be surprised with the results.